Was watching a show called Junkyard Wars tonight...
Do you know the one???
A British show...where they pit two teams against each other
give then an assignment to build a machine to do a task
and then set them loose out in a junkyard
with torches and tools, etc...
and give them about 10 hours to come up with something... ready to roll.
A couple of weeks ago, the teams had to build
small submarines to navigate around an
underwater obstacle course at a depth of about 15 feet..
another night, they had to build some kind of unmanned air machine or aircraft,
that could fly over a sand pit and drop paint bombs
on a target.
Tonight they built steam-powered personnel carriers
that had to finish 3 laps on a small race course,
and then another assignment
to build a harvesting machine to cut hay....
Sometimes the machines work quite well...
but a lot of the time, they are...well... pitiful...
Lots of times, you just listen to them planning out
how they are going to build the machine..
and you're already going... "Uh-un... that won't work"...
Probably because, as a kid, you tried the same thing one time..
Hoo yah...Yep...sure....like making a big zeppelin out of
plastic bags and duct tape...
and powering it with a small battery-powered electric fan...
and equipping it with a paint bomb
to go on a bombing mission in a sand quarry seems...well...
SENSIBLE enough...
but..it doesn't take into account things like...duh.
WIND...and...duh.... GRAVITY.... and...duh...
DURABILITY OF MATERIALS...
nope...
But see...you already know some of this stuff,
because you carried out such experiments yourself...
like the time that you attached a parachute
made from your dad's handkerchief...
to your G.I. Joe...
and tossed the poor bugger out of the 3rd story window
of the big old Victorian house you lived in back in the 1960s...
and...oops...jeez... yep...
that's how poor old G.I. Joe came to have that busted off leg....doh!!
Well, I think you know how these things go...
BTW...digression here... one especially for you, JF...
....a "postal" enquiry of sorts......
Have you ever had problems with mean little kids
who drop things on you when you are delivering mail???
I mean, like kids who drop Dinky toys hanging from paper-towel parachutes
on you when you're walking up to a house with some mail...???
or maybe those plastic darts with a cap-gun cap inside...???
the ones that go BLAM when they hit the pavement???
Just...uhm...curious about that... You know...that "enquiring minds wish to know" kind of thing.
Where was I...??
Yes, well, Junkyard Wars makes me laff...
mainly because I've SEEN guys like the ones on this show..
back when I worked at the wrecking yard.
Yep... I know those guys...
The ones who show up in the office looking kind of excited...
looking like they are on a quest...for the Holy Grail...
only, they are actually after some weirdo kind of
generator or alternator...that was on some kind of car
back in the early 1960s...
You can usually recognize them because their eyes are fairly glowing
as they describe to you, in meticulous detail,
some THING that they hope you might have
out in the yard...
because they are going to make some kind of...
AMAZING INVENTION out of THAT THING...
if you have one... JUST like the one they are looking for.
Only problem is, they never really know what that THING
is going to look like until they see it..
And they aren't really too sure what kind of a car or truck
has one on it...
So, you don't really know where to send them to find it...
And you already know that if you send them back into the field
with one of your parts strippers...
he's probably going to be gone for a good hour or so,
lifting up hoods on various cars and trucks...
showing alternators off of this or that...
but none of them are going to be JUST RIGHT...nope...
and eventually, the stripper will either wander off and leave the guy back in the mud looking around on his own,
or he's going to lose his temper and start throwing things...
Yep... I've played this game plenty of times...
enough times to know how it goes...
But, you see... I'm actually quite sympathetic to their cause...
Having grown up with a dad who could build just about anything out of anything...
Uh-huh..... he was the kind of guy that could, maybe, build a bridge
across the Grand Canyon using only uncooked spaghetti noodles...
seriously... I saw him do stuff like that all the time...
Nothing was too difficult...too IMPOSSIBLE
(actually, that word didn't exist in his vocabulary...
and I was raised never hearing it...
so I barely know its meaning either).
But getting back to my dad's creations,
his "forte" was in building things out of ...DEXION...
which is basically the adult equivalent of Meccano set pieces...
Yep... when I was growing up, if we needed just about anything,
out would come the wrenches and hacksaws and
some nuts and bolts,
and maybe the arc welder...
and next thing you know... a few pieces of Dexion had miraculously
been transformed into.... let's see....
a really cool go-kart complete with an old car seat on it,
and the steering wheel and cable mechanism from a motorboat...
and a motor out of a lawnmower...
or maybe the Dexion would end up holding together a diving raft made out of metal drums...or maybe a dock for the boats...
Yep... it was everywhere... indoors and out...
I still use it occasionally around here BTW..
But, well... getting back to that Junkyard Wars show...
There IS one curious that I have noticed about it,
and that is that there don't seem to be any women on these teams...
nope...
just a bunch of nerdy men.....
well...maybe not exactly NERDS...
but partly nerds,... and then a few Tim-the-Tool-Man guys.... and usually a serious tradesman or two...usually welders...
but no women....
But see... I have a little theory about that... (of course)..
And that is based on...well...empirical knowledge...
gained through working on various past projects.
(and yep...I know I'm probably going to have to duck down...
to avoid some kind of missives...or perhaps...missiles...
that will be launched in my direction for saying this...),
but see... this is the truth...
I have worked with guys in the trades for about...ouch...well...over 25 years now...
and one thing that I have come to know,
is that when you put together a team of guys
doing a "guy thing"...
well, they don't like to listen to wussy girls ideas...nope...
I have an example... a case in point...
which I may even have written about one time on DAR,
but no, I don't think I did.
It happened a few years ago...when a bunch of us got together
on a Saturday morning
to put the roof trusses up on a house near here...
a friend's house...
Well, we arrive... and I'm the only woman in the bunch...
which was fine... that's usually the case.
We go to put the trusses up on the roof,
but the walls are very high... too high to lift the trusses up onto with only manpower...
So, one of the men suggested putting the trusses up
by passing them through the front door of the house...
which was just roughed in at this point...
Well, that was tried... and the rafters were just too long
and couldn't be pushed, slammed, gouged,
or otherwise forced to go through the doorway and up onto the wall...
I watched as the men repeatedly tried to get the rafters to obey their commands..
but it all came to naught.
I looked at the whole problem... geometrically...
and suggested that maybe...just maybe...
if they would flip the rafters upside down first...
and then try taking them through the door,
they would just go right in as easy as pie...
and they could be flipped back upright
once they were up on the wall...
WELL!!!!!!!!!!! OF COURSE THAT WOULDN'T WORK!!!
(no reason given...but the main reason being that
the idea was suggested by a wussy girl...so it couldn't possibly work...).
So...well.. they continued to try to jam the rafters through the doorway...
for about another 15 minutes...
long enough for me to get bored at watching
something truly pathetic...
so I buzzed off home...said I had some stuff to do...
Mr. Croc stayed on to help...
and I have it on good authority from him...
that as soon as I was down the road enough
that the dust had settled behind the pickup truck,
the rafters got turned upside down and passed up
onto the roof in very short order....
Yep... all of a sudden, the wussy girl's idea
didn't seem so damned bad after all...
nope... now that it had been appropriated by a gang of guys...
well, it was a GOOD WORKABLE IDEA....
That's okay.. the price was small for an afternoon of
goofing off on my own without having to put up rafters...
oops...yah... go ahead and throw things... I'm leaving... |
